Maximum number of points?

Is there anybody who has worked with a font that needs a few hundred points per letter to get a transparancy effects, or maybe worked with a "trashy" looking font?

My problem is that I made the letters look like I wanted them to look - but when using the font in InDesign, the document got very, very slow, so I had to strip it down and try again all the time. I guess the number of points has a whole lot to do with this.

Maybe someone have similar experiences and could give some useful tips?

One of my students ran into this issue as well*, and I
didn't have an answer for her (beyond the lame "try to
limit each glyph to a few hundred points"). So I'll point
this thread out to her and keep my fingers crossed...

* She made a stencil unicase font with a variant that
mimics overspray, so it has all this simulated fuzzy
spray around the contours.

I had a student this year with the same problem Hrant mentioned. We "solved" the issue by making the text into a raster image at 600 dpi and saving it as a one bit diffusion dither. This is a technique I use all the time to print screen shots on my class handouts and they print quickly. On type it works best on grunge and distressed type or something with fuzzy edges

Hmm, I guess there is no straight answer for this one and experiment is the best way to maybe solve it, and I maybe a look at the "FontLab limitations-post" there aswell.

The thing is that I am doing the font in Fontographer, and it seems that between 200-300 points there is no problem (other than it sometimes slows down InDesign when zooming). At first when the letters carried about 600-700 points it even made InDesign crash....

But the less points, the less transparent the letters look like.

For those who are interested, I am trying to make a font that looks like fluff... ;-)

I think maybe 200-300 points is far to less points to get that effect?

You can also set the metrics in Fontographer to overlap glyph elements and make one letter out of several character pieces, each with a smaller number of points. This will limit the number of letterforms in a font but each one you did could be more complex. This was mentioned in the early Fontographer tutorials as a way to do complex logo fonts.

How do you mean split up long lines? You mean insert more points if there is a long curve?

I'm having some new stuff regarding this little issue. I opened a trashy font that was a TrueType-font in FOG, and was surprised that the font had over thousand points per glyph. This font was working just fine in InDesign, while my font with 500 points made InDesign very slow.

Here's what I mean by splitting a long path into two shorter paths.
I've "exploded" the view to show how it works -- the two short paths that cut the stem would actually superimpose (not a problem). I don't know if this technique would speed up rendering, but it allows smaller-memory printers to RIP fonts that would otherwise freeze them.

Nick, thanks for that. My english is not that well, so I dont know what "superimpose" means, but I get the idea. This is definately worth a try, since the font anyway would feel good with some transparancy here and there.

Thanks!

Otherwise, this seems a hard nut to crack - I wish someone could tell me som facts – do that, do this and it will work, so and so many points is maximum etc =)

I think Nick is alluding to the old postScript 1 errors that were frequent early on in complex paths. The solution, as he has shown, was to butt segments together of shorter paths. In effect, two paths of 20 points ripped far easier than one path of 40 points.